My father got acquainted with Shmuel Gutenmacher (nicknamed Micki) through Shabtai Gutenmacher (later Nadiv), who was Micki’s brother and a good friend of my father’s.[17]

He remembers Micki as a true idealist among the Jewish youth who were  aboard the Struma , one of the most outstanding personalities of the  Barlad-based Zionist youth organization  and also in Romania. Everybody  had  warm memories of him.

The revisionist Zionist leader Shabtai Nadiv told me that their family was native of Bassarabia. His father Zeev (Wolf) was an expert of wool-cotton companies management. He held management positions at Kishinau and Jassy and eventually settled at Barlad where he was the manager of the “Progresul” company.[18]

Micki was a member of the Beitar Zionist revisionist movement and actually his entire family was affiliated with this trend.[19] He was the assistant of the head of Beitar in Barlad. My parents remember that he was attending the Codreanu High-school at Barlad where he was an excellent, intelligent and hard-working student cherishing the hope of going to Erez Israel and working to build up the Jewish Homeland.

Micki’s family could not afford to pay for the expenses of the journey aboard the Struma, but Micki who was 21, was assisted financially by a Jewish engineer.